Reality Hunger (11 page)

James Frey’s freshman-year heartsickness becomes a desperado run-in with the law; getting caught with a tallboy of PBR becomes his role as head of an Ivy League cocaine cartel; his incarceration at Hazelden, brought on by his parents’ concern and perhaps their own inability to discipline effectively, becomes his last chance against an addiction that is certain to consume him. The process of aggrandizement: relatively ordinary
problems are overblown into larger-than-life “literature.” We, too, can make a myth of our own meager circumstances.

The JT Leroy phenomenon turned out to be a hoax, an immensely enjoyable one at that, exposing our confusion between love and art and publicity. People were made fools of—which is useful, because a good hoax is like a good con. Though a con liberates the mark from some of his material things, it also teaches him how easily he was tricked, how ready he was to believe certain stories. To “wizen the mark” is to send him back into the world a little less wide-eyed, a little more jaded, his vision now penetrating beyond the surface of things. To enlighten us, a good hoax or con must eventually be revealed.

If my forgeries are hung long enough in the museum, they become real.

Oh how we Americans gnash our teeth in bitter anger when we discover that the riveting truth that also played like a Sunday matinee was actually just a Sunday matinee.

The best illness memoirs, especially those dealing with psychiatric illnesses like depression, are written, I believe, not for the purpose of a peacock display but to offer solace. I, for one, expect that my readers will be troubled; I envision my readers as depressed, guilty, or maybe mourning a medication that failed them. I write to say, “You’re not the only one.” I write with the full faith that the reader I envision is hungry for my
talk, because I know how hungry I am for reports from the trenches, stories that might help me map my way. We must consider the illness memoir not only as, or solely as, an
Oprah
bid, but also as this: a gift from me to you, a folk cure, a hand held out. I look into my heart and see a whore there, but I also see something else. The fact is, or my fact is, disease is everywhere. How anyone could write about herself or her fictional characters as not diseased is a bit beyond me. We live in a world and are creatures of a culture that is spinning out more and more medicines that correspond to more and more illnesses. Science proves me right—the great laws of the universe, the inevitability of entropy. The illness memoir is a kindly attempt to keep company, a product of our culture’s love of pathology or of our sometimes whorish selves, a story of human suffering and the attempts to make meaning within it, and finally, a reflection on this awful and absurd and somehow very funny truth, that we are all rotting, rotting, even as we write.

When Frey, LeRoy, Defonseca, Seltzer, Rosenblat, Wilkomirski, et al. wrote their books, of course they made things up. Who doesn’t? Each one said sure, call it a novel, call it a memoir; who’s going to care? I don’t want to defend Frey per se—he’s a terrible writer—but the very nearly pornographic obsession with his and similar cases reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama.

The JT LeRoy contretemps: we’ll write some novels, have someone pretend to be him so that we have a huge backstory, which is what gives the whole thing a claim on anyone’s heart. No one gives a damn anymore about the garret-bound artist struggling with his “truth” narrative. Contemporary narration is the account of the manufacturing of the work, not the actual work. What I’m interested in: the startling fragment, left over from the manufactured process. Not the work itself but the story of the marketed incident, the whole industry surrounding a work’s buzz. We want the vertiginous details. If you think the heart is deceitful above all things, you should meet the author.

A frankly fictional account would rob the memoir/counterfeiter, his or her publishers, and the audience of the opportunity to attach a face to the angst.

What if America isn’t really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it’s the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?